“Even when they’re wrong, they’re right”

The biggest problem with immigration is the common misperception
that it is a problem. But shifting unduly negative perceptions requires more
than simply presenting the facts.

A refugee holds up flowers to the welcome march in solidarity with the refugees residing in the jungle of Calais. January, 2016. Sadones Frederik/Press Association.
All rights reserved.The overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that
immigration is generally a good thing – for the societies that receive talented,
hard-working and diverse newcomers, not to mention for migrants themselves. Yet
public perceptions of migration are often much more negative. How, then, should
this chasm between perceptions and evidence be addressed?

The charge sheet against immigrants is wearily familiar.
They stand accused of stealing locals’ jobs and depressing their wages,
burdening the state and public services, causing crime and terrorism, and much
else. But while some immigrants do bad things (as do some locals), these
charges are largely unsubstantiated. On the contrary, migrants tend to contribute
to society by filling jobs that not enough locals want to do or can do, while
their diversity and dynamism tend to boost creativity, innovation and
enterprise.

One response is to claim that the data fails to reflect voters’
lived experience and that people’s first-hand perceptions are surely more
accurate than dry statistics and aloof academic analysis. Yet a subjective
interpretation of an anecdote – an unemployed local builder sees a Polish one working
and blames the immigrant for his lack of a job – is scarcely rigorous evidence.

Indeed, negative perceptions of immigration are often not based
on personal experience. It is telling that while few people in Britain think
immigration is negative for them personally, many believe it is detrimental to
the country as a whole. And in both the UK and the US attitudes towards
migration are often much more negative in areas where there are few or no migrants
than in areas where there are many. Mediated misperceptions are even less
credible than first-hand ones.

Misperceptions – who
needs them?

If one accepts that the evidence – albeit inevitably
imperfect and incomplete – is more accurate than perceptions, then the question
is what to do about the misperceptions. Unduly negative perceptions about
immigration may be due to ignorance, misinformation, misinterpretation or prejudice.
They are exacerbated by the fear-mongering, xenophobic rhetoric and outright
lies of unscrupulous politicians, anti-immigrant campaigners and media
propagandists. And they are validated by governments that often find it
convenient to blame migrants for their own failings.

Some people argue that in politics perceptions are
everything and that even well-meaning politicians and campaigners must accept
many voters’ incorrect perceptions about migration as a given. “Voters are
always right. Even when they’re wrong, they’re right,” as one political
strategist puts it. But it is neither right nor effective for politicians to
pander to people’s misperceptions and prejudices. If people wrongly believe
that their long wait to see a doctor is due to immigrants even though migrants
are in fact net contributors to public finances and disproportionately
medical-care providers, it is neither fair to migrants nor helpful to voters to
validate their mistaken view. Centre-left or
centre-right politicians who echo the lines of the far-right don’t defeat it,
they become it.

The claim that such pandering is nonetheless necessary to
ward off the far-right is wrong-headed. Anti-immigrant prejudice isn’t acceptable
simply because it comes from a “mainstream” politician. Centre-left or centre-right
politicians who echo the lines of the far-right don’t defeat it, they become it.
Indeed, far from dissuading voters from backing far-right parties, such
pandering often encourages them to vote for the real thing.

It is vital that instead of validating misperceptions and
lies, politicians, campaigners and commentators put a positive, evidence-based
case for immigration. They need to dispel ignorance and misinformation with
information, misinterpretation with explanation, and confront prejudice head
on. For instance, people typically think the immigration share of the
population is much higher than it really it is; better information can help.
Many people believe it is common sense that every job filled by a migrant is
one less for locals; one can explain that there isn’t a fixed number of jobs to
go around and migrants also create jobs when they spend their wages and in complementary
lines of work. When Donald Trump slurs Muslim refugees as would-be terrorists, it
can be pointed out that no American has been killed by Islamist terrorists who
arrived in the US as refugees.

Compelling stories
and rational delusions

At the same time, facts are not enough to persuade everyone
– especially since many people have lost faith in experts since the financial
crisis and dismiss or ignore those who make sober, fact-based arguments that
challenge their views. So politicians, campaigners and commentators also need
to tell emotionally compelling stories that resonate with different voters,
reclaim some of the language and values that the enemies of open societies have
seized as their own, and put forward policies to address the very real problems
of angry and anxious voters who incorrectly blame their plight on immigrants.

Compelling stories take many forms. They can be overarching
narratives about how people born into a community and those who have chosen to
join it can work together for the common good, illustrated by personal stories
about immigrant nurses providing care to elderly locals. The most compelling
stories are sometimes visual. The image of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who
washed up dead on a Turkish beach in 2015, produced an outpouring of empathy
for refugees that for a while trumped xenophobia. The
most compelling stories are sometimes visual.

Stories need to be accompanied with an attempt to reach out
to those with different values and to speak their language. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, a
social psychologist at New York University, argues that liberal westerners
suffer from a rationalist delusion that reasoning can cause good behaviour and
is our pathway to moral truth. Yet in practice, he writes, most of our
conscious reasoning is after-the-fact justification for our moral intuitions,
which shape our emotions and unconsciously govern our behaviour.

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the
rider’s job is to serve the elephant,” he says. “Therefore if you want to
change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant
first. If you ask someone to believe something that violates their intuitions,
they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch – a reason to doubt
your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.”

It is right to make a political argument for openness to
immigration on the basis of freedom, equality and justice. But some will find
this unpersuasive. So one should also make the case of immigration on other grounds,
such as patriotism.

Patriotism

Reactionary nationalists and xenophobes tend to claim that
they are the only true patriots and that excluding immigrants is patriotic. Since
liberals and progressives often feel uncomfortable talking about patriotism, they
generally surrender this political and moral ground. Yet that is a mistake, as
Jack Graham argued
in a recent piece for OPEN, an
international think-tank that I founded to defend and advance open societies.

If patriotism means wanting the best for your country, that
should mean seeking to overcome the barriers that are holding it back from
progress. It ought to be about imagining how much better a country can become,
not harking back to an idealised past. Thus welcoming refugees is “morally
commendable – a point of real national pride,” as Graham argues, and indeed
many Germans feel. In the US context, emphasising how many veterans are
immigrants can also sway patriotic-minded voters. Persuading
people on migration is not just about narrative and framing. It also has to be
about policies.

Persuading people on migration is not just about narrative
and framing. It also has to be about policies. Politicians need to put forward
bold solutions to the many problems – such as stagnant wages, insecurity,
unaffordable housing and strained public services – that are often blamed on
immigrants. That would be desirable in itself. And it would help address
opposition to migration that is based on identity issues as well as
socio-economic ones.

In many cases, opposition to immigration that is ostensibly
based on race, religion and identity issues is also tied to economic and social
deprivation, lost status or fears about the future. Economic pain brings
distributional issues to the fore and migrants are a convenient scapegoat. So
addressing the very real economic and social problems that many angry and
anxious voters face and wrongly blame on immigrants can also go some way to
assuaging cultural fears.

Personal interaction
and change

For sure, some people will remain unpersuaded. Psychological
studies show that people with an emotional dislike of foreigners tend to come
up with pseudo-rational arguments to justify their xenophobia. Thus when
immigrants are working, they are taking our jobs; when they are unemployed,
they are scrounging off the state. When they are rich, they are driving prices
up; when they are poor, they are driving standards down. Immigrants can’t win:
they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. We
should not take some people’s xenophobic attitudes as given any more than we
should accept racism and other forms of prejudice.

Even so, change is possible. We should not take some
people’s xenophobic attitudes as given any more than we should accept racism
and other forms of prejudice, which is generally much less virulent and widespread
than fifty years ago. Personal interaction also makes a huge difference, one
reason why perceptions of immigrants are generally so much more positive in
diverse cities where people mix. Indeed, young people who have grown up in an
ethnically diverse society tend to find it normal, so there is good reason to
believe that social attitudes to migration will become more positive over time.

openDemocracy will be at this year's World Forum for Democracy,
exploring the impact of populism on our media, political parties and democracy (see the programme for more details).

More On

See more on OPEN, an international platform for progress whose mission is to break down barriers.

Teresa Buczkowska will be a panelist at WFD2017's Panel discussion 2:
What should be the response to anti-migrant populist rhetoric and
action? on 9 November 2017 - 9.00-10.30 - Palais de l'Europe, room 5.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.